Bringing SAP to life

Sodexo

Deciding that it needed to achieve closer integration between its subsidiaries, operating across 33,000 sites in 80 different countries, Sodexo turned to oXya for help with its European operations.

Based on an interview with Antoine Cossic, VP Quality and Finance & Supply Chain Systems and John Bruylant, CTO of the Sodexo group

Our information system has been a key element in our strategy for optimising business coordination. We are a worldwide group with 33,400 sites across the world, a fact that forces us to have very strict administrative and management rules. On the other hand, our organization is based on a strong entrepreneurial culture.

The group is very dynamic at every level, innovation and rapid decision making is encouraged. The result is that each country tends to develop its own IT. Four years ago we ended up with totally disorganized system, composed of a wide variety of teams and technologies. In 2007, we decided to centralize our European IT to optimize Capex and to improve service delivery. Our goal was to create an integrated system that would ease communications between different geographic entities. oXya was recommended to us by SAP. We also worked with Linkbynet for the hosting part of the project.

We wanted a pragmatic approach that recognized the need to complete the project quickly. We started by setting up a workshop that brought together the Sodexo and oXya teams to settle the most important questions first.We discovered right away that oXya was able to pick up on the way we work. It’s a mix between maintaining the highest standards and being extremely responsive. They understood our internal organization really quickly, adapted to it, and developed a real collaborative empathy with our teams. This symbiosis between the teams ensured smooth communications and allowed us to plan ahead easily.

We discovered right away that oXya was able to pick up on the way we work. It’s a mix between maintaining the highest standards and being extremely responsive. They understood our internal organization really quickly, adapted to it, and developed a real collaborative empathy with our teams.This symbiosis between the teams ensured smooth communications and allowed us to plan ahead easily.

Even though our new architecture was being sized by our previous service provider, oXya still agreed to help with this task. Their expertise proved really useful when we realized that the original sizing would not be sufficient to deliver the level of performance that we required. Despite this tricky situation, the migration was completed successfully. The preparation steps were performed meticulously and our teams worked together seamlessly.Since we started to work with oXya, all our indicators went from red to green (laughs). Our reporting is now on time! With oXya we gained peace of mind and we can concentrate on our core business and our ROI. Our previous provider had a rigid and quibbling culture that was not compatible with our entrepreneurial type of organization.

oXya is specialized in SAP Basis administration. The company is agile enough to adapt to the identity and requirements of their specific customer. Since the inception of the project, oXya modified the way they were working to adapt to our model. This is not the case for most service providers.